She recoiled, and burst into a wild sob: 

‘John, I—­I couldn’t know!’

‘Well, go on,’ he said, abruptly, raising himself—­’go on.  You found that picture in my room—­I’ll tell you about that presently—­and you wrote me the letter.  Well, then you went back to Euston, and you sent Daisy away.  After that?’

His stern, sharp tone, which was really the result of a nerve-tension hardly to be borne, scared her.  It was with painful difficulty that she collected her forces enough to meet his gaze and to reply.

’I took Carrie to Liverpool.  We had to wait three days there.  Then we got on a steamer for Quebec.  The voyage was dreadful.  Carrie was ill, and I was so—­so miserable!  We stopped at Quebec a little.  But I felt so strange there, with all the people speaking French—­so we went on to Montreal.  And the Government people there who look after the emigrants found me a place.  I got work in an hotel—­a sort of housekeeper.  I looked after the linen, and the servants, and after a bit I learnt how to keep the accounts.  They paid me eight dollars a week, and Carrie and I had a room at the top of the hotel.  It was awfully hard work.  I was so dead tired at night, sometimes, I couldn’t undress.  I would sit down on the side of my bed to rest my feet; and then the next thing I’d know would be waking in the morning, just as I was, in my clothes.  But so long as I slept, it was all right.  It was lying awake—­that killed me!’

The trembling of her lips checked her, and she began to play nervously with the fringe of the tablecloth, trying to force back emotion.  He had again seated himself opposite to her, and was observing her with a half-frowning attention, as of one in whom the brain action is physically difficult.  He led her on, however, with questions, seeing how much she needed the help of them.

From Montreal, it appeared, she had gone to a fruit-farm in the Hamilton district, Ontario, as housekeeper to a widower with a family of children varying in age from five to sixteen.  She had made the acquaintance of this man—­a decent, rough, good-tempered fellow, Canadian-born—­through the hotel.  He had noticed her powers of management, and her overwork; and had offered her equal pay, an easier task, and country air, instead of the rush of Montreal.

’I accepted for Carrie’s sake.  It was an apple-farm, running down to Lake Ontario.  I had to look after the house and the children—­and to cook—­and wash—­and bake—­and turn one’s hand to anything.  It wasn’t too hard—­and Carrie went to school with the others—­and used to run about the farm.  Mr. Crosson was very kind.  His old mother was living there—­or I—­wouldn’t have gone’—­she flushed deeply—­’but she was very infirm, and couldn’t do anything.  I took in two English papers—­and used to get along somehow.  Once I was ill, with congestion of the lungs, and once I went to Niagara, with some people who lived near.  And I can hardly remember anything else happening.  It was all just the same—­day after day—­I just seemed to be half-alive.’